Any references to methods, apparatus or documents of the prior art are not to be taken as constituting any evidence or admission that they formed, or form part of the common general knowledge.
A body of water has two types of energy that can be harnessed to generate electricity: hydrostatic and hydrokinetic. Hydrostatic is the potential energy of a water body due to its height with respect to a reference ground. Conventional hydropower plants use dams and reservoirs to store water with a large amount of hydrostatic energy in order to harness the energy in a controllable manner to generate electricity.
Hydrokinetic energy is the kinetic energy of a water mass due to its movement. The faster the water velocity, the larger hydrokinetic energy it contains. There are two types of hydrokinetic energy current-based and wave-based hydrokinetic energy. Current-based hydrokinetic energy can be found in river streams, artificial waterways, irrigation canals, tidal and ocean currents.
An advantage of extracting hydrokinetic energy is that it is not necessary to build dams or reservoirs. The energy is extracted from the natural flow of water along the river stream, irrigation canal etc.
It is an object of the invention to provide a hydrokinetic generator for harvesting power from fluid flow that is an improvement over hitherto known generators.